28 April 2009

Not one, but two unpaid GIS internships at the Highlands Council up in Chester, NJ. It could be a great opportunity to advance your skills, build professional contacts, contribute to a key area of New Jersey and and learn about the real world.

This Spring we are starting a new tradition here at Rutgers - Review Days. Our Landscape Architecture design studios will be holding their juries over a two day period on Thursday and Friday, April 30 and May 1. Professionals and alumni are welcome to attend, but asked to attend an entire session rather than popping in and out for the sake of the students. Please check the schedule online for details.

24 April 2009

Between Landscape Architecture month, Earth Day, Arbor Day, National Trail Volunteer Week, and Ag Field Day, it turns out that this week is also National Parks Week. The photo is from Grand Teton National Park.

As promised, the centennial of the Burnham plan for Chicago has brought lots of new commentary and reporting on the plan. Continuing the celebration, Urbanophile has written up an 8-point list of what made Brunham's plan work.

MapEcos has mashed-up the TRI pollution data with Google Maps to make a useful interactive pollution map that might be a bit more intuitive than some of the others out there.H/t MapEcos through Lifehacker

With 100 year floods happening every few years around here, it is good to hear that FEMA is updating their maps for Middlesex County. It isn't just a change in flood patterns, but an improvement in the terrain modeling, now that they are collecting their data with LiDAR. According to the Home News and Tribune, their update moved another 1,000 residences into the floodplain.

Shortened Description: The New Jersey Highlands Council is accepting applications to fill internship positions to assist in the development of the Council’s Geographic Information Systems. The position is a part time internship position with compensation ranging between $10 and $14 per hour depending upon qualifications/education. The position is geared towards students of GIS who are looking to advance their academic or applied knowledge of location based technology in a regional planning context. The position is best suited for someone who has a background in the natural resources and/or planning disciplines with GIS experience and/or coursework. The internship will provide excellent exposure and practical experience in applied resource management and regional planning. Work hours as well as start and end dates of employment are flexible. Summer only interns are encouraged to apply as well. The New Jersey Highlands Council office is located in Chester Township, Morris County, New Jersey.

In Dr. Beidler's talk on Wednesday, he mentioned Ray Oldeburg's coining of the term The Third Place to described social spaces on neutral ground where people can engage in community interaction. In new urbanism this is often adressed with a desire to design spaces - from front porches to mainstreets to public squares - that will change public life. It occurred to me that some readers might only be familiar with Dr. Oldenburg's work through the use of Third Place as a reference to Starbucks.

Totally unlike Main Street, the shopping mall is populated by strangers. As people circulate about in the constant, monotonous flow of mall pedestrian traffic, their eyes do not cast about for familiar faces, for the chance of seeing one is small. That is not part of what one expects there. The reason is simple. The mall is centrally located to serve the multitudes from a number of outlying developments within its region. There is little acquaintance between these developments and not much more within them. Most of them lack focal points or core settings and, as a result, people are not widely known to one another, even in their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhood is only a minority portion of the mall’s clientele.

A narrow 40-year house needed to be updated and enlarged for a growing family. Automobiles and asphalt dominated the arrival and outdoor experience. A drive-thru carport and a cul-de-sac sized asphalt parking area (4,300 square foot) were located at the ‘front’ door. The house was one lot away from the constant noise of a major roadway and lacked any outdoor shaded areas.

The solution is described in detail on the ASLA awards site. The description makes clear how much change was achieved on the site:

This project illustrates how new design work can be artful and at the same time responsible to the natural environment. The house celebrates where we live rather make apologies for it. The house strives to be in harmony with the site. A 6,600 square foot asphalt driveway and parking area has been replaced with porous decomposed granite paving. The entry courtyard with Palo Verde trees replaces the guest parking area outside the front door.

The jury was pretty impressed saying:

"Transforming. The landscape architect's ability to combine architectural elements with dramatic plant materials make this such a welcoming space. Great lesson value on sustainability in residential design, this garden emphasizes innovations in the use of native plants and shade trees."

And, since he has won several other ASLA design awards, our students and alums are welcome to stop by the Blake Hall reading room to read about them in our colection of Landscape Architecture Magazines.

15 April 2009

For the latest installment of Cool Class, we have a brand new class that could count as an advisor-approved Planning class for the Environmental Planning Certificate or Option.

11:372:413 Open Space Planning and Management

This class is being taught by Dr. Frank Gallagher, who was recently described by the Star-Ledger as an administrator for the state Division of Parks and Forestry, who is managing the future development of Liberty State Park.

Greetings from Dubai: Design, Environment and Impressions of a New Middle East

Rather than talk about his own work, Mr. Appel talked about the larger context of this important place.We are all temporary stewards and we try to learn lessons from the past. But here is a place with no lessons from the past, no history, no grounding to identify what is important. The Bedouin history is limited, there was a little pearl industry and a small port city.

Dubai3:1 Male:Female ratio83% of the city residents are expatriates – they can’t own propertyHome to the iconic Burj Al-Arab hotel and the tallest building ever, the Burj DubaiIn 2006 the population had grown to about 1.4 million (over 1 million men)The Palm Islands will have 4000 villas, 1000 water homes, 5000 apartments

Qatar45 minutes by plane from Dubai, but a very different approachDoha is taking down its embassies to create green space along the waterLess than half a million residents, more expats than notHas protected older places and created other quality spaces - Souk marketplaceIt is a place of contrasts - Fishing ships cross in front of modern structuresThe heat still requires better indoor spaces like at the Sidra Medical and Reserach Centre

They are not immune to the dramatic - check out this video of their island complex called The Pearl...

The environmental impact may not get discussed as much, but the opportunity to participate in some of these unparalleled experiences is a trade off that some designers won't make. And the cultural conflicts are tough, so guides have emerged. But this is an important place and different people and groups are dealing with it in different ways - ULI has a new magazine called Urban Land Middle East.

Summary: Not a travelogue, not a design presentation, but a serious and thoughtful discussion about this emerging world center.

This Friday's MaGrann Conference includes James Wescoat, former chair of landscape architecture at Illinois and currently the Aga Kahn Professor of Architecture at MIT. The whole thing is a short walk from Blake or ENR and Friday looks like a great day for a walk. Just click on the banner for details.

Greetings from Dubai: Design, Environment, and Impressions of a New Middle East

Dubai and Doha are major cities in the Persian Gulf whose historic importance as port towns has been modest for centuries. Traditionally nomadic tribes, the people of this sparsely populated desert region have oral traditions, which leave little history to print, and few building traditions which express their culture or environment.

The relatively recent discovery of oil and natural gas has however, changed all of this. With the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971 and the Gulf Cooperation Council soon thereafter, the modest cities of Dubai and Doha have grown in profoundly different ways. They share however a regional and international influence, which in less then twenty years has been remarkable.

The pace and scale of development in both cities has occurred at a rate unprecedented in world history. Some of it is thoughtful and embracing the best lessons of design and sustainability that the international design community has to offer. Much of it unfortunately is not. The absence ofhistorical context, building traditions, urban experience, and ecological priority has resulted (in my humble opinion) in a search for design identity. While this exploration is healthy and necessary, the rush to build has not afforded the time required to find the "self".

"Greetings from Dubai" will present an overview of what has occurred, what is planned and some of the challenges and opportunities facing the local population, the international community and the environment.

As the senior principal of Wells Appel, Stuart Appel's unique approach to his work seeks to merge the logic of planning, the art of design and the science of ecology. His practice requires a regional understanding of context, culture, and natural systems in the creation of landscapes, which are sustainable and compelling. His three decades of work suggest that great places, which are noteworthy and memorable, are designed and sustained, through a genuine understanding of and respect for the community's values, history and context. http://www.wellsappel.com/

Abstract: New Urbanism is an all-encompassing term that refers to an increasingly popular set of design tenets that draw upon traditional urban forms in the creation or redevelopment of residential communities. Although design professionals are increasingly adopting these design tenets in the creation of new communities, there is no research that either supports or rejects New Urbanism's underlying assumption that neotraditional design tenets are capable of fostering a "sense of place." This assumption is essentially a normative claim that presumes the principles of the New Urbanism can have a measurably positive effect on sense of place (Kelbaugh 2002; Congress for the New Urbanism 2000).

This research project employs an existential-phenomenological approach to understand two specific people-place relationships. The project first explores how a "sense of place" arises for residents of a neotraditional neighborhood located in Blacksburg, Virginia. The methodology then investigates the influence of physical form in the development of a sense of place.

Analysis indicates that social interaction in the form of un-structured chance encounters with neighbors heavily influences the transformation of mere space into place. Further analysis indicates that such encounters are not directly related to density. Rather, the spatial quality, therelationship between the built and un-built environment and the design of the public/private realm emerge as key factors in encouraging such residential experiences. The results are discussed in the context of the New Urbanism design tenets.

"A slow-moving Category 3 hurricane or larger will flood the city. There will be between 17 and 20 feet of standing water, and New Orleans as we now know it will no longer exist."—Ivor van Heerden, October 29, 2004

12 April 2009

Many of our undergrads have never seen a grad-level presentation. Here is one that might be particularly interesting to our landscape industry students:Plant Biology Graduate program announces a non-thesis MS defense seminar."Best Management of irrigation Practices and the Physiological Effects Associated with the Use of Reclaimed Water in Golf Turf Management"Tim Sibicky, MS candidate2:30 - 3:30 PM, Monday (April 13)Room 138A Foran Hall

11 April 2009

Since Alejandro Zaera-Polo will be speaking at Princeton on Monday, I thought this might be a good chance to post some photos of Foreign Office Architects' park in Barcelona that is called either South East Coastal Park or Auditoria Park (map). The park is a slice of an architecturally rich area that includes Herzog de Meuron's Forum, Torres & Lapena's giant solar panels, a Beth Galli pier, another park, and a port area. One of the key design elements in the park is the simple concrete moon shaped block that is both paver and wall unit. The repetition makes the blocks simultaneously common and exotic.

10 April 2009

We also like seeing some of our students quoted - Jenna Gatto and Sarah Nitchman got a little more famous today. Hopefully, it won't be their last chance to be in the Targum (I am thinking..."Major alumni donors propel LA Department").

09 April 2009

Being close to Princeton University has its advantages. One is that they can afford some great speakers and conferences. If you are going to live, study or practice here, it is worth keeping an eye on what happens down in Mercer County.

Columbia's Sarah Williams (the Fall 2008 Environmental Geomatics Lecturer) got a great feature in the NY Times on her spatial research looking at the location of Buzz. This also represent an important link into some of the questions being asked about VGI:

For Ms. Williams the geo-tagging represents a new wave of information that can be culled from sites like Flickr and Twitter. “We’re going to see more research that’s using these types of finer-grained data sets, what I call data shadows, the traces that we leave behind as we go through the city,” she said. “They’re going to be important in uncovering what makes cities so dynamic.”

The NJ ASLA and Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture were in yesterday's Home News and Tribune as part of an advertisement of Landscape Architecture Month. Aside from our lecture series, they also mentioned other ways to celebrate including Ag Field Day and an Elaine Mills historic tree tour of the Lawrenceville School campus.

07 April 2009

NJPIRG has put together a pretty impressive panel that will be focusing on solutions:

On Wednesday, April 8 in the SAC from 7pm to 9pm NJPIRG will be hosting a Global Warming Solution Panel. Panelists include Congressman Frank Pallone Jr., Professor Anthony Broccoli, Professor Jennifer Francis, Professor Mike Kennish, Professor Oscar Schofield, and Environment NJ Representative Doug O'Mally. We will be discussing the issue of Global Warming, it's impact on the world and environment, legislation that could help address the problem (such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act that Congressmans Waxman and Markey have recently proposed) along with other solutions to the most challenging and important problem that our generation faces. Each panelist will give a short presentation on their field of expertise and then we will open the panel up for discussion and to questions from the audience. All are welcome to attend!

Now that EnvPlan's Assignment 1 is nearly due, it might be a good time to think about grammar. Since this is college, it is reasonable to expect that a three page paper should be written in proper English and demonstrates your ability to use your new planning vocabulary eloquently. To help you prepare, you might check out this quick grammar quiz.

But I don't want to see even one misuse of Roll Call. Do not spell it Role Call! (Better still, don't write about it or the Pledge of Allegiance, since neither are an important element in analyzing the outcomes of the meeting)

04 April 2009

The other day I overheard some design students complaining about a tough critique on their first iteration of a project. Designing, changing, redesigning, and changing again is part of the process. Jason Tselentis clearly agrees, as he explains in this essay on Speak-Up.

For our students:Returning from my latest trip, I found my advising sheet (ENR 133) all filled up, so I have squeezed in a few more spots. Most questions shouldn't be too urgent since you can't add classes until the 12th. Still, if you procastinate signing up, the later slots will be filled as well.I have also added a little suitability analysis piece to the EnvPlan class materials.

01 April 2009

Miami Beach has a new Hargreaves waterfront project, South Pointe Park, which just opened a week or two ago. The $22 million project features the usual earth mounds and light towers and fountains. (Mapped)In the photo above you can see that the white light directed in one direction, for pedestrian safety, while the LED colors were most visible in the other direction. This side view illustrates the footprint of the light.

The light towers kept changing colors, but it was primarily visible from the ocean side.

Photo note: The brightest of these photos were taken at dusk and most were taken later, all without a tripod. I apologize that they are not nearly as good as the ones that will surely appear in LAM and Metropolis, but at least I get in on the game early.

About the Author

An Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. He also serves as Associate Director of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis and Undergradaute Program Director for Environmental Planning and Design. As a graduate of Kentucky (BSLA), LSU (MLA) and Wisconsin (PhD), he has a passion for the critical role of state universities as a source for world-class research and education based on inquiry arousal but is too busy keeping up this award-winning blog. Dr. Tulloch can be reached at dtulloch[at]crssa.rutgers.edu

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